Roy’s concrn for environment can be seen in her creative writing and essays like The Greater common God and The End of Imagination. Her role in Narmada Bachao Andolan and her view point regarding nuclear weapons can be comphrehended as her concern for human welfare.
River meenachal is the most intergral feature of Roy’s natural landscape. Amost …show more content…
Greygreen. Like rippled silk. With fish in it.With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.” (123) But the present condition of the river is presented by the author with great remorse and she writes, “Years later, when Rahel returned to the river, it greeted her with a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand rose from a hospital bed”. The river has a sick appearance now. And she adds, “It had shrunk” (124). Even the rains cannot bring back the original depth and width of the river. She says: Despite the fact that it was June, and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequinned with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a succulent weed, whose furred brown roots waved like thin tentacles under water. Bronze-winged lily trotters walked across it. Splay-footed, cautious. (124)
But the change in river, excessive deterioration and degeneration due to man’s excessive interference with natural resources, development shocks Rahel. On her coming back to Ayemenem, she notices several degeneration in the landscape, especially river meenachal appears quite strange, filthy and polluted to her. The contrast between Rahel’s growth and river’s shrinking is extremely painful. Filth and saturates it with unwanted …show more content…
On the way to Cochin along with their mother, uncle and grandmother Rahel and Estha look at the scenic sublime and the beautiful countryside of Ayemenem and its neighbouring places:
“It was a sky-blue day in December sixty nine… A sky-blue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice-fields and old rubber trees, on its way to Cochin. Further east, in a small country with similar landscape (jungles, rivers, rice-fields)… It was peace time and the family in the Plymouth travelled without fear or foreboding.”